You can tell when someone joined the hobby based on what steel they think is “okay.” If AUS-8 and D2 are pretty good steels, you started paying attention to knives in the 80s. If you think that M390 is the baseline, then you started about 5 years ago. We all understand this on an intuitive level and we all fall prey to this. For me, as I have written many times before, most people don’t need something better than M390. But that shouldn’t be the end of the analysis. The reason why is the topic of this article, something that sparked in my brain while snowblowing a driveway once every four hours for two days.
Steel, like almost everything else, is a product and products all come packaged to us by marketing people. Now it is a bit different than, say, Benjamin Moore paint in that its specs are its marketing, but there is marketing associated with it nonetheless. Go look at forum posts and videos from the late 90s. People refer to VG-10 as a super steel. That’s the consumer repeating marketing speak. There is no such thing as a super steel anymore than there is a “best buy” house paint. Its all relative and mostly what the law calls puffery (which is jargon for acceptable levels of deception when engaged in the marketing or sale of a product).
EverydayCommentary: Steel Inflation
Is there ever an end to steel discussion. If you are reading this, you are in the vast minority of people who care, and can actually tell the difference between common steels. S30V is the OG super steel for me, and it is waaay outdated.
Read the whole thing at EverydayCommentary.com
https://www.everydaycommentary.com/www.everydaycommentary.com/2026/1/26/steel-inflation